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Early 2012, Wikimedia Germany e.V. will start the development of a new and ambitious project that aims to change the Web once again [1]. We are currently looking for a number of people to help us with realizing this goal. The team will be based in Berlin, Germany, and the project aims to be implemented in one year. After completion of the project, we expect many more interesting software projects inspired by this one, so follow-up projects might be possible. In all positions it is a plus to understand Wikipedia and collaborative community processes and communities in general, to speak English and further languages, and to appreciate the scale of a project like Wikipedia.

The information can be found on the Web here: http://wmde.org/wikidata-jobs

Applications can be sent to and more information about the position are available from Denny Vrandecic (denny.vrandecic@wikimedia.de).

Applications for the director and manager should be sent in by November 10. Applications for the other positions should be sent in before December 1.

Feel free to send this information to potentially interested parties.

We are looking for the following positions.

=== Project director ===

The project director has to represent and embody the vision of the project, ensure that the final goals of the project are met, be able to motivate the team, express it clearly in communications with the community and external parties, take the responsibility for communicating with the donors, ensure the necessary visibility of the project, and be able to help anyone in the team with anything required. The director has to be fluent in spoken and written form in both English and German, further languages are useful, be able to demonstrate their deep understanding of community-driven projects, feel strong about open data, open source, and their processes, have a thorough and critical understanding of semantic technologies, and have a record of successfully lead projects.

=== Project manager ===

The project manager has the task to remove all impediments that are blocking the team from reaching their goals, to moderate the team and team meetings, provide administrative support, accompany the development process, ensure that internal project rules are upheld, and support the team whenever needed by coaching and mediation. The project manager will pro-actively assist the project director in their daily work, and also support the project with any external and internal communication needs and knowledge to manage problem solving processes. The project manager has to be fluent in spoken and written form in both English and German, have very strong organizational and communications skills, a high flexibility, and be able to proactively support the team in order to keep it on track.

=== Wikimedia community communication ===

The community liaison will support the communication between the Wikidata team and the Wikimedia communities. The person will collect the feedback of the communities, present and represent their concerns and ideas, monitor relevant channels, and answer them if possible, or support the Wikidata team in their responses. A track record of their involvement with the Wikimedia communities needs to be presented. We are looking for a person that has earned the trust of the communities, and that will keep their loyalties not with the Wikidata team but with the goals of the Wikimedia communities in general. Further languages beyond English are a strong plus, especially German due to the location of the project.

=== Quality assurance lead ===

The quality assurance lead will be responsible for unit and integration tests, organize usability tests, ensure together with the system administrator to have scalability tests, attack and try to breach the system security and user privacy, and provide continuous feedback on the quality of the implementation. We are looking for someone who loves to break things, and enjoys being right and show others that they are not.

=== System administrator ===

The system administrator has the task to set up and maintain a realistic development and public testing environment, in close cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation that will provide the Wikimedia labs environment. The system administrator will furthermore ensure that and assist the team with their technical needs, and manage and maintain any required software infrastructure. The system administrator will also ensure the operation of the live project and the seamless transition of the project maintenance and operation to the Wikimedia Foundation.

=== 6 developers ===

We are looking for six world-class web developers that have a strong sense for the needs of a project that has to scale to be one of the most visited sites in the world. The project will be developed in PHP and use JavaScript extensively. Expertise in one or more of the following topics is welcomed: internationalization issues, browser interoperability, expressive web user interfaces, graceful degradation, web API development, very large dataset management, and scalable and secure web development. The development will be based on MediaWiki, Semantic MediaWiki, and jQuery. Experience with these is a strong plus.

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Wikidata